Local surgeon on front lines in Afghanistan

PORTSMOUTH — Dressed in a crisp white lab coat, Dr. James Rothstein is back on U.S. soil after spending seven months of active duty as a commander in the U.S. Navy in Afghanistan.

Suzanne Laurent

PORTSMOUTH — Dressed in a crisp white lab coat, Dr. James Rothstein is back on U.S. soil after spending seven months of active duty as a commander in the U.S. Navy in Afghanistan.

He walks briskly down the hospital corridors, no longer weighted down by his "battle rattle," the name soldiers give to the 40 pounds of equipment and weapons they carry around their assigned base.

Rothstein, a vascular surgeon at Portsmouth Regional Hospital, has spent almost 19 years in the Navy, with 15 years of active service. This was his first tour to the Middle East.

His previous active tours were in Bethesda, Md., during Desert Storm, and being stationed at Okinawa, Guantanamo Bay and in the Philippines.

After being activated last summer, Rothstein first trained for two weeks at Camp Pendleton at the Naval Expeditionary Medical Training Institute in California. He then spent five weeks at Fort Dix in New Jersey for Army training that included land navigation, use of weapons, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected training, roll-over training and hand-to-hand combat.

From there, Rothstein went to Germany, then on to Afghanistan for more training.

'Boots on the ground'

"I began what they call 'boots on the ground' around Sept. 19," he said.

Rothstein spent five months at Lagman, a forward operating base, and two months at the Apache forward operating base. On the way to Lagman, his medical unit stopped at Kandahar.

"The first nights (in Kandahar) were kind of jail-like," he said. "I remember a siren went off at 3 a.m. with a British female voice saying 'rocket attack.' This happened a lot because the Taliban were inaccurate with rockets. There was a saying (in regard to IEDs), 'if you didn't drop it, don't pick it up.'"

Everyone walked around with loaded weapons for safety, Rothstein said. "There were negligent discharges around the country weekly and a lot of accidents," he said.

The quarters at Lagman were quite tight. "I pretty much lived and worked within the same 75-yard space."

His living quarters were in an old Russian prison. "It was where we lived worked, operated," he said.

He compared life on the base to the television show "M*A*S*H."

"Pretty much operating, sleeping and drinking, except we couldn't drink in Afghanistan," he said. "We got used to hunkering down after a while."

The flight line would bring in the injured and the medical staff would triage them and security wand them for metal.

"We treated both sides, so we had to be sure," Rothstein said. "In fact, we treated more Afghans than Americans."

All the wounded would go into a trauma bay that had three beds. They would then go to the intensive care unit or to the operating room and back to the ICU.

"We stabilized the wounded until they could be sent to the hospital in Kandhar," Rothstein said. "The idea was to get them out as quickly as we could. The hospital in Kandahar was rebuilt in 2010 to be bomb resistant."

Rothstein said he felt relatively safe.

"Mostly, we walked in pairs," he said. "At night it was pitch black because there were no lights allowed on after sunset. You couldn't see the person walking next to you or coming opposite you."

However, he added, "The stars were unbelievable."

Rothstein performed more than 115 surgeries during the seven months he was in Afghanistan. He was the assistant officer in charge and did a fair amount of administrative work.

"You kind of build a routine," he said. "When it's busy, time goes by fast; but when it was slow, it dragged."

Rothstein said he met "some very nice people over there."

"I felt like we were doing good for the people we saw," he said. "They are so very different from us. They believe in 'In sha'Allah' or God's will."

Texting the family

Rothstein lives in Durham with his wife, Laura, and their four children: Michael, 17, Joey, 15, Alexandria, 14 and Brian, 10. He did his general surgery residency at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., and his vascular surgery fellowship at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

"This deployment was difficult for my family, especially my 10-year-old," Rothstein said. "With my older kids I emphasized that this was their service to their country. I asked them if I could save just one life, wasn't it worth it?"

Rothstein is an active hands-on parent, coaching three seasons a year.

"I got all the kids dog tags and my oldest wore a blue star service flag pin," he said. "He took it off the next day after I returned home and he knew I was safe."

He added that his wife opened a store in Durham called SolSistar with a friend last August just after he left for active duty.

"My wife is a strong person," he said. "The kids did well and we had a lot of support from neighbors and friends who would help with plowing, car problems or if something went wrong with the furnace."

He kept in touch with his family mostly by texting because of the 9½-hour time difference.

"My oldest son drives and he helped with driving the younger kids to practices and games," Rothstein said. "The kids really supported each other."

Coming home

Rothstein has been employed at Portsmouth Regional Hospital as a vascular surgeon with Appledore Seacoast Vascular Center for 2½ years.

"The administration stepped up and helped to make sure my job was secure and that my family would be well taken care of," he said. "(CEO) Anne Jamieson was awesome. She told me to 'go and do what you need to do.'"

"I knew it would be a hardship on the people left behind to keep the practice going. ... We kept in contact with e-mails."

At the end of Rothstein's tour, it took almost two weeks to get home to New Hampshire on May 3. When he arrived in Baltimore, his younger brother, Edward, a U.S. Army colonel stationed at Fort George G. Meade, surprised him at the airport.

Rothstein is still settling back into family life and working at the hospital. His active duty ended June 1.

He describes the feeling of leaving life, as he knew it, for seven intense months.

"Imagine you're on a treadmill and there are two people on either side of you having a conversation," he said. "You get plucked off for a while and then dropped back and the people are still having the same conversation. You think, 'did that really happen?'"

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